Teeny tiny, itty bitty, super duper, big
Melody Paloma
2021, digital text.
Commissioned by Firstdraft. Courtesy the writer.
Soft Power presents experimental responses, new critiques and speculative futures in the face of myriad power systems we must confront and dismantle. Like her peers, Melody Paloma explores what is obscured and nullified in emergent and established systems of power.
Teeny tiny, itty bitty, super duper, big interrogates the violence of settler colonial aesthetics. The poem circulates around the concept of colonial kitsch and its relationship to mythmaking, monument and extraction.
Melody Paloma is a poet and UNSW MFA candidate, currently living in Naarm/Melbourne. She is the author of In Some Ways Dingo (Rabbit, 2017), and, with Elena Gomez, Leah Muddle, Ella O’Keefe, Emily Stewart and Sian Vate, co-author of It’s What We’re Already Doing (Shower Books, 2018). Over the course of 2018 she produced Some Days, a durational chapbook-length work published by Stale Objects dePress and performed in 2019 with Liquid Architecture. Melody’s work is concerned with the tyranny of colonial aesthetics, infrastructure, and the politics of work. Her poetry and criticism have been published widely.
In tiny town, everyone’s mayor. Not like communism but like, stroll on in and take up office, like all chit chat and no policy. And by stroll on in I mean observe freshly mown lawn over a waist-high gate, assign homes and jobs to your mates and head to the pub once you’re done. Like no difference really. In nipaluna Greg tells me it’s something out of place, something out of context. As in Edgar Wilson built this thing in Lambeth, a gift of war, and for it shipping, packing and custom fees were waived. Well I call that a trojan horse. Like Cook’s cottage bundled up brick by brick and placed in barrels. Like Trim the fucking cat. Like the colony. Like tiny town but big. Like it’s noon and the city aligns, drags its shaky anchor. Out my dirty little window it’s all St Paul’s Cathedral, Matthew Flinders, the penthouse suite of BHP. Squint and there’s the board room grazing, a PowerPoint and a fistful of double brie. “A point of conjecture.” 253 cases and 40 barrels. The highest bidder. When you tell them, make sure you point out the ivy, the original cutting. With surety it can be said. The empire, the empire.
Across the street plastic koalas grip onto your shirt collar, your backpack, your index finger, your morals. So grippy it takes more than flicking. The red gum rattles and the fairy’s face peels off. A mummified brush-tail. Pretty cute. How about we make it tiny, pack it in with monuments for your pocket, miniature washboards and little girls in linen, and in the circumstance of “the street was never there” then we’ll call on ghosts to build them. Tiny cottage, tiny school, tiny hotel, tiny barn, tiny bank, tiny mill, tiny stocks, tiny well, tiny house for William and Anne, tiny Stussy S on a paperbark. Pssst… When he died, Shakespeare left his wife his second-best bed. THE PLANE TREES, NOT THE PLANE TREES!? Prices with exclamation points, a bargain, a bargain.
I’m back in the garden and thinking about concrete, the face of it like papier-mâché. I’m buying stocks in knick-knacks and letting their value accrue. Flora and fauna line the work site, hard hats dish out high-vis. Monday’s a public holiday and countenance comes with rambling eaves, with Arnott’s bickies, with a single tear and a hard-earned thirst.
Hey these emblems are getting dusty, the archives pulling souvenirs and fragments glued over. ‘Kitsch’ – its origins less clear… To coat, to smear, to sketch, to knock off cheaply. The sentimental mirror folds back, one infinite loop. Cute, as in so cute I wanna squish you, so cute I wanna crush you, as in cute house, cute like needs a mother, cute like repression. Cute as in ‘acute’ – like coming to a sharp point, like power. And even when you can climb up inside its head, it’s flat or it’s hollow, like no ‘what if,’ like no relation. And in the case that tiny fails, then I ‘spose we’ll make it big.
Sources:
Araluen, Eevelyn. Dropbear, Brisbane: Univeristy of Queensland Press. 2021.
Araluen, Evelyn. ‘Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in the Ghost Gum.’ Sydney Review of Books, 11 Feb 2019.
Birch, Tony. “Come See The Giant Koala.” Meanjin. Vol. 58, no. 3. 1999. Pp. 60-71.
Birch, Tony. ‘‘Death is Forgotten in Victory’: Colonial Landscapes and Narratives of Emptiness’, Object Lessons: Archaeology and Heritage in Australia, eds. T. Ireland and J. Lydon, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005. Pp. 186-200.
Deacon, Destiny. DESTINY. 23 November 2020 – 12 February 2021. National Gallery of Victoria. Melbourne.
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, The White Possessive: Property, Power, And Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. 2015.
Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2015.
Olalquiaga, Celeste. The Artifical Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience. New York: Pantheon Books. 1998.
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